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About SWOfire.com

SWOfire.com was created to help serve the constituents and staff of Southwest Oregon District by providing up to date wildfire information and statistics. This site is focused on sharing information for wildfire operations, land management, and public information. It also provides information about landowner assistance programs and seasonal employment opportunities.

Additional Resources

SWOfire.com provides up-to-date information about wildfires occurring on Bureau of Land Management and private ownerships in Jackson and Josephine Counties. For additional information about wildfires outside of our protection jurisdiction, visit https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/

During a wildfire, the Oregon Department of Forestry works to hard to insure that the constituents of our District have access to the most up-to-date information about about the status of evacuations in place. However, due to the extremely dynamic nature of wildfires, these evacuations are often subject to change without advanced notice. To verify the status of current evacuations, please, contact your county’s sheriff office.

Right now that for is just developing. A team is ordered and is due to in brief at days creek school at 6. As more info and maps come available I will put them up. You can also Google “DFPA” to get the latest news since they are the agency in charge.

First, my apologies for the delayed response. We have been keeping very busy, but your comments are important to us!

ODF has changed the way we do lightning maps. Starting this year, we have purchased lightning strike data directly from Vaisala, a weather observation and monitoring company. The result is more accurate and more reliable data for our firefighting resources. An unfortunate tradeoff is that we are no longer at liberty to share this proprietary data with the public as per the terms of our licensing agreement.

However, I can tell you have lightning has been consistent and uniform throughout Jackson and Josephine County for the past several days, with the largest concentration of strikes occurring in NW Jackson County by Prospect and Butte Falls.

If you’re curious, I encourage you to seek out lightning tracker services that are in the public domain. The National Weather Service of NOAA is an excellent resource. Blitzortung.org is a free, public lightning tracker project with cataloged historic data and real time tracking ability. Weatherbug.com offers a similar service.

Would you PLEASE give access to “Current Fire Information” on your website, WITHOUT having to enter a “password” to get into your site. ODF’s site has no Taylor Creek Fire News, whatsoever. I am a few miles, and down-wind, from the Taylor Creek Fire, and I’d like to be able to get current information (at least twice a day) without having to tie up phone lines calling the dispatcher. I don’t “do” facebook. You are my one and only Fire News source. Right now, I can’t see the trees across the road for the smoke, and I have livestock to take care of.

Unfortunately, we are contractually obligated to protect access to the active incidents page, because we are hosting proprietary data on that page. Oregon Department of Forestry contracts a third party vender for highly accurate lightning tracking data in order to help our resources find fire during lightning storms. Those data are accessible through the active incidents portal on our site, and we are under an agreement requiring us to restrict non-paying customers from accessing those data.